It is known to use vacuum cleaning in image forming devices such as printing machines or printers.
For example, in xerographic printing architectures it is known to use vacuum devices to clean residual toner from the surface of a photoreceptor drum. Also in xerographic printing architectures, it is known to use vacuum devices to clean web-fed paper paths to promote general cleanliness, thereby preventing image quality defects due to stray paper dust particles.
It also is known to use vacuum cleaning in ink jet printing architectures. For example, in solid ink jet printers the media or paper introduces particulate contamination into the image exchange engine (“IME”) where it can reach the apertures of the print heads, resulting in temporary, intermittent weak or missing (“IWM”) or permanent, chronic weak or missing (“CWM”) jet failures. Such IWM or CWM jet failures, in turn, reduce print quality and the mean number of copies between interventions (“MCBI”). Moreover, it is well known that particulate contamination can find its way into the small jetting orifices characteristic of ink jet printheads, and cause either temporary or permanent printhead failures.
Accordingly, it is known to use vacuum plenums to remove contaminating particles in ink jet printers, especially in the vicinity of the ink jet print heads.
Also, in solid ink printing architectures which use an intermediate image drum, it is known that vacuum cleaning of the image drum can remove such contaminants from the drum surface and from the entrained air boundary layer, thus reducing the contamination flux to the print head aperture plate.
Further, it has been shown that vacuum cleaning of the imaging drum just upstream of the print heads can remove these contaminants from the drum and the air boundary later, thus reducing the number of jet outages and increasing printer reliability.
However, there are substantial limitations with these existing methods to remove contaminating particles.
Thus, there is a need for the present invention.